‘Cloud Computing’ is a nebulous term, encompassing many different services. We can help you find the right service for your needs, implement a solution based upon it and provide managed support once the solution is running.

Amazon Web Services

Bashton were an early adopter of the Amazon Cloud (Amazon Web Services or AWS) platform - our account dates from April 2006, one month after it was launched in beta. Indeed, this website runs on the AWS platform. Bashton staff are regular attendees and speakers at the AWS User Group North meetings held in Manchester.

We have carried out a number of deployments on AWS, both small and large, and work in partnership with the team at Amazon throughout the sales, implementation and support stages.

PCI Compliance

We support a number of customers running e-commerce sites on the Amazon Web Services platform. Whilst compliance with the PCI DSS standards is an issue for many other cloud platforms, it is perfectly possible to do this on AWS, and indeed we have implemented many infrastructures which do so.

Auto Scaling

Much of the power of the AWS platform lies in the ability to ‘auto-scale’ - essentially to grow the infrastructure when demand increases, and shrink when it falls away. Doing this effectively not only provides the ability to cope with surges of traffic, but can also realise large cost savings.

More than just a technique to cope with busy months, when utilised correctly autoscale enables your infrastructure to respond to demand on a minute-by-minute basis, ensuring efficiency and performance.

Security

Many customers taking their first steps into using cloud computing are concerned about the security implications.

In fact, the Amazon Web Services platform provides higher security than a typical physical server setup. A key part of the AWS platform is the concept of ‘security groups’, which essentially act as firewall for each individual server. This allows for much more finely grained controls than the usual per-subnet rules typically applied in traditional setups.

Demonstrating the high levels of security the AWS platform offers, there is a specific ‘GovCloud’ region for use only by the American government. This is utilised by a number of high profile internal and external facing US government sites, but offers no extra security beyond that offered in all other Amazon Cloud regions.